‘The skies are blue and the ocean too!
When you are sad you may feel the blue!
Be strong every morning night and day!
A blog and a sketch will drive your blues away!’
Rarely someone may say his or her favorite color is blue since it is associated with melancholy! In ‘blue’ is one of the most often used words in rock and boy bands all over the English music world!
Now since the skies and the water is blue! You may assume that nature has plenty of blue! But when was the last time you saw a thing of nature which is blue in color? Even the famous story of the Blue Jackal is an example of an exception which made the blue colored jackal rare and unique!
All light is a form of electromagnetic energy, waves that can travel through a vacuum. The waves fall on a spectrum, with some having longer or shorter wavelengths. X-rays, microwaves and radio waves are all part of the spectrum, each with their own wavelength. There’s only one sliver of the spectrum that we can see, and that’s the visible light spectrum.’
Reds and yellows have relatively long wavelengths, blues and violets have the shortest which of course is the way we explain the spectrum to kids! In fact the acronym VIBGYOR is what my kid’s school is named after!
The color we see is the wavelength that reflects most from that object. Take a yellow sunflower, for example. It absorbs the blue, red and other color energy waves then reflects back wavelengths that appear yellow. The color receptors in our eyes then translate the flower’s wavelength into its color and send that to our brain!
Blue is a tough color to spot in nature because there is no naturally occurring blue compound to color things blue! Yes! In spite of you being blue so often, the pigment blue is not seen in nature and the color blue is so rare!
This is why blue rocks and minerals are so rare and why it was so valuable back when the Egyptians began mining the vibrant blue lapis lazuli mineral thousands of years ago!
Ok now you will immediately think blueberries are everywhere and they are quite common! They are technically deep purple, not blue, and their color comes from the purple anthocyanin compound! Now blue has so many shades that it gives me the blues! One fine day my daughter told me that the color I was holding was not blue but cyan and I still did not get it! I know seven colors and that is that! In fact I did not know Indigo is different from purple and they both are different from violet!
But there are blue butterflies, peacocks, berries and a few other animals with rich blue hues. So how do the true blue plants, animals, and minerals get their color if there is no actual blue compound? It’s all in how these organisms are built and this includes even those rocks which are blue!
The color blue is the result of how light bounces off these structures – it’s actually called structural color! Light hits special structures on the cell, wing or other part of an organism that cause the wavelengths to bounce a certain way – in the very short wavelength way that results in the color blue! So they appear blue not because of Biology but physics! And on the subject of subjects, cinema is art and birthday celebrity Gary Leonard Oldman is a master! I still find it hard to believe that the Villain in the Fifth element is Detective Gordon in the Batman!
Now wishing that a good night sleep will drive your blues away!
Shubh Ratri!
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